Cunk on Earth (2022) s01e04 Episode Script

1
Last time, we saw
how the Renaissance turned Europe
from a load of mud and parsnips
into a posh resort full of paintings,
and how this awakening
led to a string of people-power uprisings
that put the establishment on its arse.
But the revolutions were just beginning.
Humankind was about to leap forward again
by taming metal and electricity.
Progress would usher in a new era
of convenience and entertainment,
but also threaten the existence
of all life on Earth.
So, swings and roundabouts, really.
This week it's the rise
of the machines here, on Earth.
And also here on Cunk on Earth.
For centuries, everything in nature,
from people to cows,
ran on this
fresh air.
If you haven't heard of air,
it's an invisible blend of gases
so addictive,
we suffer fatal withdrawal symptoms
within minutes
of our supply being cut off.
This dependency made air's rival,
water, jealous.
Water needed to up its game.
It needed to become more indispensable
to us, its natural masters.
It was feeling the heat.
Heat that turned it into something useful.
Steam.
Steam could be harnessed
to power all kinds of machines.
And nowhere went steam bonkers
quite like America,
where it would change the shape
of the country's face forever.
To understand why,
I'm afraid we have to look at a map.
At first, settlers
had stuck to the edges of America,
leaving the middle untouched,
like a frozen pie in a microwave.
But Americans back then weren't
the humble, unassuming people
they still aren't today.
They believed in something
called Manifest Destiny,
the belief that all the land
belonged to them
and that God wanted them to go west
and claim it back
from the Native Americans
he'd put there first by mistake.
What is Manifest Destiny?
Manifest Destiny is a ideology
that was in the 1840s and '50s
in the United States,
that America had a God-given right
to take over the rest of the continent
and sort of spread its values
and its virtues from sea to shining sea.
- So it was God's plan?
- That was the idea, yes.
Doesn't this make you God's slaves?
Well, I think what the people
of the time would say
is that they were
God's missionaries on Earth.
And so they felt that they were
willingly enacting his policies
rather than being forced to do so.
But at the very least,
you're God's bitches.
But manifesting
your destiny was dangerous.
You had to trundle across
a perilous landscape in a rickety wagon
on the brink of starvation or shitting
yourself to death with dysentery,
getting bitten by snakes
or butchered by Apaches.
Almost as if God didn't
want them to do this after all.
But the invention of the steam train
changed all that.
The steam train
laughed in the wagon's face.
Not literally.
This isn't a children's book.
The Americans released
steam engines into the wild,
carving routes across the land
and changing the balance of power.
Now, fighting with Native Americans
could be conducted at high speed
and with an accompanying
buffet car service.
Thanks to the railroads,
small towns formed all across the west.
They were tough, lawless places
where summary justice was dispensed
down the barrel of a gun,
as cowboys did whatever it took
to protect their cows, and their boys.
So can you talk us through
what this is here?
This is the Colt single action
army revolver, the Colt 45.
And you load it through here,
and you'd have to cock the hammer back
for each shot.
Would this only kill people
during the olden days?
Or could it kill modern people too?
I'm afraid it
definitely could kill modern people.
It's so old.
It sort of looks clockwork, doesn't it?
Do the bullets come out slowly?
Could you sort of outrun the bullet?
You definitely couldn't outrun the bullet.
You're right to say it looks clockwork.
It's very like a clock mechanism,
with a ratchet inside.
- Rat shit?
- A ratchet.
Where do the bullets come out?
Do they come out of that pipe bit?
They do. Yeah, that's the barrel.
Can I hold that up
and look down the end of it?
Or will that shoot me in the eye?
It's generally frowned upon.
So would getting shot in the eye
actually hurt?
Because it's just a sort of water bag,
isn't it, your eye?
I bet it'd just pop and sting a bit,
but you'd basically be able
to go about your business.
I don't know, I don't think
there's any good place to get shot.
Why does humankind feel the need
to invent killing machines like this?
And could you keep your answer
to a sort of soundbite length?
Because we're human I suppose?
It seems to be built into us
to fight for resources,
other humans.
- Yeah.
- Can't seem to get away from it.
I know. I just think we're mental.
Guns played a huge role in shaping
America and also in killing people.
Even now, the use of firearms
is an integral part
of their national identity.
How come Americans have the right
to kill anyone they want with a gun?
Well, they don't.
Murder is illegal in the United States,
but they do have the right to own weapons.
- They have the right to bear arms.
- Correct.
- But bears don't have arms.
- They do, actually.
Do they? I thought they were legs.
Well, I'm not a biologist,
but I suppose that when they stand up,
they're probably arms.
With its cowboys and guns
and steam train rides,
America became known
as the land of the free,
which must have come as a surprise
to all the slaves.
The barbaric practice of slavery
was still prevalent in America,
particularly in the southern states.
But by finally thinking hard
about the subject,
the people of the northern states
made a horrifying discovery:
that inside each slave
was an actual human person.
The North asked the South
what kind of America it wanted to live in:
one where white people
leeched off other races
while treating them as inferior
or one where they pretended they didn't?
The argument escalated into a civil war,
a time when America
was almost as polarized as it is today.
The Civil War
tore America apart, didn't it?
Brother turned on brother.
Did anyone get so conflicted
they turned on themselves?
I don't think so.
Uh There may have been some
very strong debates within individuals
of which side to join, and I think that
could be what you're perhaps referencing.
How come people say
it was the first modern war
when you can see from the photos
it was ages ago?
It's interesting you reference the photos
because it's the first war
that photography really played a part.
Um, it was something where photographs
were part of the conflict
and documenting the violence.
Must have been quite exciting,
going to Snappy Snaps afterwards
and seeing which ones had turned out
and which ones hadn't.
After four long years
of war-related violence,
the North came out on top,
which north is anyway.
It was a victory for the undisputed
king of the North, Abraham Lincoln.
Who was Abraham Lincoln?
And why did he have
all those weird tattoos on his tummy?
I have no idea what
you're referring to with the tattoos,
but he is a US president,
revered as probably the best US president.
Apparently he had, like, a snowman
and a robin tattooed on his tummy
and the robin had a moustache.
I genuinely have no idea
what you're referring to.
Now Lincoln was president,
at long last slavery was abolished
and replaced with simple racial prejudice.
But Abraham Lincoln's story
didn't have a happy ending.
Five days after the North won,
a terrible fate befell him.
He was forced to go to the theater
to watch a play.
He was put out of his misery
by a kindly gunman.
But cruelly, not until the third act.
Abraham Lincoln was shot
in the theater box, wasn't he?
Where is that on the body?
I think you're referring to the physical
location he was in when he was shot,
which was in the presidential box
at Ford's Theater in Washington, D.C.
And why was he shot?
Was it because
he wouldn't take his hat off?
Because that's annoying in the theater,
when someone's in front of you with a hat.
He was in the presidential box,
so there wasn't anyone behind him,
as far as I know.
But he was shot by a man
named John Wilkes Booth,
who was a believer in the Confederacy.
How did being shot in the head
affect Lincoln's ability to lead?
Well, it ended it, because he died
about 12 hours after he was shot.
- So he couldn't carry on.
- No, not as a corpse, unfortunately.
Lincoln's light may have been snuffed out,
but America's was about
to do the opposite.
Americans had been toying with electricity
ever since Benjamin Franklin
put a key on a kite string
to unlock lightning from the sky.
Then, in 1878, Thomas Edison
worked out how to use that power
to make something extraordinary.
It's hard to imagine a world
where Edison didn't invent the light bulb.
And even if you did imagine it,
it would be too dark
to see what was in it.
How did people see during the day
before Edison invented light?
Light comes from the sun so people could
see during the day because of the sun.
What they needed the light bulb for was
during the night when there isn't any sun
and when you can't see.
So what did people use before light bulbs?
Well, they used candles or they used oil.
So we had daylight during the day
and we had candles at night.
Yes.
So we didn't need light bulbs.
His life's work was meaningless.
Another of Edison's incredible inventions
was the phonograph.
I want to spoon ♪
To my honey ♪
I'll croon love's tune ♪
Honeymoon ♪
Keep a-shining in June ♪
Your silvery beams ♪
- Can you make it stop?
- Yes, of course.
It's incredible, isn't it,
that we're here now,
but that voice came from years ago.
If I speak into this trumpet bit,
can I ask the person a question
about what it's like where they are?
No, you can't, because the recording
was made over a hundred years ago.
But it's a phonograph.
Doesn't it work like a phone?
Phonograph means "sound writing" in Greek.
So it doesn't mean "telephone."
So they can hear us but they can't reply.
Uh I wouldn't say
They can't hear us.
We hear them, we hear their recording.
They can't hear us
and they can't reply to us.
- Uh, I would say they can't, no.
- So what's the point of it?
Well, it's so we can hear music
and voice and sounds.
So can it record sounds
that haven't happened yet?
Um
No.
What about sounds that happened earlier?
If those sounds were recorded at the time.
It can't capture something
that's been in the past.
It seems quite limited, to be honest.
Thanks to Edison's pornograph,
classical music
could now bore an audience of millions.
You have to play classical music
on an orchestra.
How do you play an orchestra?
Do you blow into it
or is it one of those ones
where you rub a stick on the strings?
Yeah, so, the orchestra
is not one particular instrument.
Yeah.
So an orchestra is the coming together
of lots of different types of instruments.
- Right. More than one instrument.
- More than one instrument.
So you need both hands
and your mouth to play an orchestra.
Well, the conductor would need
all of those things,
but the orchestra itself is an entity
that is made up of
lots of different instruments.
So you couldn't blow a whole orchestra?
Thanks to Edison, the worlds of light
and sound had been beaten into submission,
but another frontier remained
stubbornly unconquered:
the world of sky.
People tried for years
to build flying machines,
but most early pioneers
found it hard to progress
beyond their first
experimental death plunge.
But all that changed
when Orville and Wilbur Wright brothers
mounted the first successful
legal challenge
against the law of gravity.
So how far was the first flight?
Well, on that day when the Wright brothers
carried out several flights,
they were typically of the order
of just a few hundred feet.
They could have walked that.
Well, they could,
but that wasn't the point.
When was the first flight
that was long enough to need a toilet?
Once commercial flights developed,
those flights became longer distance
and the passengers would have
then needed some comforts,
like having a toilet on board.
That must've been a real moment,
the first time someone realized
a plane needed a toilet.
That's more impressive
than the Wright brothers.
I've never thought of that
as a particularly dramatic
or exciting development, I'm afraid.
Why don't bicycles have toilets?
It would save you having to get off.
I might write that down and copyright it.
Even without a toilet,
the Wright Brothers' historic flight
changed transportation forever,
in ways that still
aren't fully understood.
The Wright Brothers did the first
proper flight over a hundred years ago.
How come we're still not any closer to
working out how aeroplanes actually work?
But we are. We know how they work today.
But in reality, how do they work?
Well, it's
we have mathematical equations
that describe the way the air flows
over the wings of the aircraft.
Can you explain how they work
without resorting to science?
It's difficult
not to explain the science behind it,
but because of the shape of its wings,
the force upwards
is bigger than the force downwards.
So that pushes the plane up into the air.
That's your theory.
Do you want to hear my theory?
- Okay.
- I think they run on belief.
It's just because
we believe planes can fly that they do.
So the media has to keep up the pretense
or they're gonna start
dropping out of the sky.
Same with Wi-Fi.
There's no way that's real.
We just have to go along
with this pantomime
or everything grinds to a halt.
The sky had been tamed.
Next it was the road's turn.
It's hard to say
who invented the first automobile.
Because so many people had a go,
the Wikipedia page
is too long to bother reading.
But luckily it doesn't matter
because in the end,
only one man became synonymous with cars,
the man who made the first
blockbuster automobile.
He was named Henry Model-T Ford.
And in a stunning coincidence,
so was his car.
With its four-cylinder, 2.9-liter engine
pumping out 20 horsepower
and a top speed of 45 miles per hour,
the Model-T Ford was a truly terrible car,
even worse than
whatever it is your mum drives.
There's nowhere to plug in your phone,
no satnav or music system.
It doesn't even have a cup holder.
Nonetheless,
it was marginally better than a horse
because it didn't kick you in the head
if you went behind it.
And unlike on a train,
you weren't likely to find yourself
seated next to a psychopath.
Unless you stopped to pick up a hitchhiker
with a screwdriver in their pocket.
But Henry Model-T Ford's biggest
masterstroke wasn't his car itself,
but the way it was made.
Instead of employing one person
to slowly make a whole car on their own,
Ford employed lots of people
to do just one tiny bit of the car each
over and over again.
It was a revolution in workplace tedium
and human meaninglessness.
Mass production
needed a mass human workforce.
Millions flocked to the USA
for a go on the American dream.
The need for bigger vessels
led to the invention of the Titan 1C,
the world's first single-use submarine.
For years, man had stared at the ocean,
longing to sink like a stone,
and the Titan 1C
would make that dream come true.
It was a huge success.
On her maiden voyage, the Titan 1C
sailed straight from Southampton
to the bottom of the sea,
where the brave explorers
could live in the lap of luxury
for the few moments
it took for them to discover
that the atmosphere on the ocean floor
was non-breathable.
Having conquered light, sound, the sky,
the road and the bottom of the ocean,
humankind was about to discover
something it hadn't even heard of before,
courtesy of female scientist and woman
"Mary Curry,"
lady father of radiation.
How did Marie Curie realize
that she'd discovered radioactivity
if it's invisible?
Marie Curie invented
the word "radioactivity."
And radioactivity is when a substance,
like radium, polonium, plutonium,
gives off lots of energy
and disintegrate naturally.
So it's a real thing,
even though it's invisible.
Lots of real things are invisible, yes.
So it's like chakras and energy fields,
you know, like the ones
you get on the inside of your face
that connect to your star signs
and affect the way you digest gluten.
They're real, aren't they?
- Well, I don't think that they are real.
- I think they are real.
Well, lots of people
My Aunt Carol realigns people's chakras.
She charges 80 quid an hour.
I think if she was earning
that kind of money,
it's not nonsense, is it?
Tragically, Curie's curiosity was fatal.
Long-term exposure to radiation is thought
to have contributed to her death.
It's not fair, is it?
When a male scientist like Bruce Banner
gets exposed to gamma radiation,
he gets to be, like,
a superhero, doesn't he?
He gets his own comic book
and movie franchise.
Marie Curie just gets killed.
You know, he got to be the Hulk.
That's not fair, is it?
Is it the fault of the patriarchy?
Also, what is a patriarchy?
Meanwhile, other less female scientists
were working on theories of their own.
Physicist and professional tongue model
Albert Einstein
came up with his theory of relativity,
E equals McTwo,
which to this day nobody understands.
I'm only mentioning it because
it turns out to be important later.
Einstein reckoned nothing is faster
than the speed of light,
but shadows go faster than light.
Like, if I shine a light from a torch
against that wall
but I hold the torch behind my head,
my shadow gets there
before the light does.
How would Einstein explain that?
I think he'd say that it's all happening
so quickly that you can't see it properly.
He's always got an answer, hasn't he?
The 20th century
got off to a cracking start,
with science shitting out
innovation after innovation,
so quickly we can
barely edit them together.
But some of these new inventions
had a dark side.
They could be used to kill people,
and not in a good way.
The First World War was known
as "the war to end all wars,"
although some historians
now argue it didn't.
But it was the first high-tech war,
with aeroplanes, machine guns and tanks
all rising up to fight
the human beings that made them.
Despite having no beliefs or ideology
or hearts or souls,
the killing machines were victorious.
The final score was
weaponry 20 million, mankind nil.
When humans go to war,
it always looks quite chaotic.
Is there a lot of shouting involved?
There tends to be
an awful lot of shouting.
It can either be commands being shouted.
It could also be, you know,
the screams of people dying.
So probably a risk of tinnitus
for anyone standing nearby.
It's a real pity we keep doing it.
I'm not trying to be controversial,
but generally speaking,
war does seem a bit of a shame.
Well, it does seem to be
a particularly popular human activity.
Maybe it's just in our nature.
What makes us as creatures
turn on each other like that?
And could you keep the answer
to one short sentence?
Because otherwise
they get really pissed off in the edit.
Fear, honor and interest.
Really? Those are the three?
That's it in a nutshell.
I don't know who edits this,
but that's going to have to do.
The barbarism of World War I
inspired a wide range of harrowing
war poems and pacifist literature,
published decades before the release
of unrelated Belgian techno anthem
"Pump Up the Jam."
Pump up the jam, pump it up ♪
While your feet are stomping ♪
And the jam is pumping ♪
Look ahead, the crowd is jumping ♪
Pump it up a little more ♪
Get the party going
On the dance floor ♪
See, 'cause that's
Where the party's at ♪
And you'll find out if you do that ♪
I want a place to stay ♪
Get your booty
On the floor tonight ♪
Make my day ♪
I want a place to stay ♪
Get your booty
On the floor tonight ♪
Make my day ♪
Millions of young men died during the war,
but fortunately, humankind
had discovered a new kind of man:
the woman.
Women had always existed
in the background of history,
largely being used as human pets for men,
tolerated for their magical ability
to excrete fresh humans
through their front holes.
But in the early 20th century,
social scientists
discovered something incredible:
that a woman could do
anything a man could do,
without the need to talk about it.
They also got the vote.
Finally, women could choose
which man would tell them what to do.
Women began
to escape their traditional uniforms,
dressing less like haunted furniture
and more like camp young boys.
They drank, smoked
and danced at high speed,
at an appalling frame rate.
Meanwhile, in Hollywood,
a whole new kind of entertainment
was being invented: movies.
Unlike with a book,
you didn't have to concentrate
or use your imagination to enjoy a movie.
Anyone, even very lazy or stupid people,
could enjoy themselves
by simply sitting down and staring
at a screen, like you're doing now.
Nonetheless, early movies
were completely shit, as you can see.
But it's thanks to early films like this
that we can see what life was really like
in the olden days.
Everyone moved very quickly
and fell over a lot.
Why do people in old films move so fast?
Is it because it was their first time
on camera so they were nervous,
or because it was a silent film
so they couldn't hear the director
yelling at them to slow down?
It's to do with the frame rate
of the cameras
was different then to what it is now.
So it's our fault.
We're playing it back too fast
and the actors are having to speed up
to make sure they can get
all the story in before the end credits.
They must be panicking.
What happens if they can't keep up?
Would the film cut to a room
the actors aren't in yet?
Just footage of an empty room?
The actors are going at a regular speed.
It's just the speed of the playback
that makes them look like
they're moving very quickly.
Could we communicate
with the actors in the film
and tell them that it's all right,
that they can calm down?
No. They'd all be dead by now.
Oh.
so people could still watch them
on their phones with the sound off.
But before too long,
they figured out how to do sounds too.
What was more satisfactory to you?
Reading was redundant at last.
The written word's centuries-long era
of tyranny was finally at an end.
But any sense humankind
was embarking on a hopeful new era
was about to be shat through a bin bag.
Dark clouds were gathering over Europe
with a reboot of the World War franchise
about to be unleashed.
Soon, the world was plunged
into another global war,
and since this war run on even more
terrible machinery than the previous one,
it seemed
there would be no end to the carnage.
Then the Americans had an idea.
Instead of dropping thousands
of little bombs on Japan
like they did to Germany,
what if they dropped just one big one?
Using Einstein's theories,
which I cleverly mentioned earlier,
they began the Manhattan Project,
run by men with hats on,
who came up with something fearsome:
an atomic bomb called Little Boy,
the most powerful and inaccurately named
weapon ever used.
How powerful was Little Boy?
Put it this way:
if that bomb had been dropped
on my ex-boyfriend Sean's house
in Westhoughton,
everything, from the Chequerbent
roundabout on the A58
to the florist
next to the Hart Common Golf Club,
would have been totally destroyed.
The initial blast
would have vaporized Sean,
while the vintage Pac-Man arcade cabinet
he once spent my entire
birthday weekend restoring
would have almost certainly
been rendered unplayable
by the raging firestorm that followed.
Everything from Wigan to Bolton
would be burnt to a crisp.
I'm talking Middlebrook, gone.
Bickershaw, gone.
Hindley Green, forget it.
The unspeakable horror
of the atomic bomb ended World War II.
Everyone had had enough
and the world agreed for the second time
in this episode to never have a war again,
a promise it wouldn't break
for a full 52 seconds into episode five.
It's comforting, isn't it, to realize
we don't have nuclear weapons these days?
Well, it depends who you mean by "we."
The British have got nuclear weapons
and have recently indeed
decided to increase
the number of warheads that they possess.
Yeah, but they're blanks, aren't they?
They're full of blanks.
No, not at all.
No, no, these are fully capable
missile systems with nuclear warheads.
Many other states have them.
I'm afraid that nuclear war
and the threat of nuclear destruction
remains very much with us.
Right, can we talk about something
a bit more cheerful?
Anything you like.
- Do you like ABBA?
- I love ABBA.
- Yeah?
- Yeah.
- What's your favorite ABBA song?
- "Dancing Queen."
"Dancing Queen," yeah.
Yeah, it's great, isn't it?
Next time we see how a cold war
between East and West
paved the way for rock and roll,
which paved the way
for countercultural hippies,
who paved the way for Steve Jobs to pave
the way for computers and smartphones,
which paved the way for social media,
which would pave the way for undoing
all the progress
humankind had made so far.
Social media has been polarizing
people, hasn't it?
Like what's already happened to the bears.
- What bears?
- Polar bears.